Movement conservatives are unlikely to win a popularity contest among Republican voters or anyone else. At no point between 1955 and 2016 did most Republican voters, let alone most Americans, share the goals of movement conservatism and its libertarian bankrollers. The elections of Republican presidents and congressional majorities, including the two terms of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have never been the product of popular enthusiasm for the libertarian scheme to repeal the New Deal, the neocon scheme to wage wars of democratic regime change, or the religious right’s scheme to set America’s moral clock back to before Elvis went on the Ed Sullivan Show.

In contrast, the Modern Republicanism of the Eisenhower-Nixon coalition was genuinely popular. Reagan talked like the radical anti-government Barry Goldwater of 1964, but as president he governed like Nixon, avoiding large-scale foreign military interventions and negotiating with Gorbachev as Nixon had negotiated with Mao. Having denounced Medicare in the 1960s as a socialist plot, President Reagan was careful not to attack either Medicare or Social Security; indeed, he proposed federalizing Medicaid and backed a federal scheme for emergency health insurance, evocative of Nixon’s plan of 1974 for universal health coverage.

You have a choice, then, Republicans. You can follow the Nixonian path—realist in foreign policy, nationalist in trade and finance, accepting labor unions and social insurance entitlements with appropriate reforms, and backing law and order in the streets without policing between the sheets. Or you can follow the stealth libertarian path of movement conservatism, enacting the economic agenda of libertarian donors while distracting voters with performative patriotism and religiosity stage-managed by political consultants. To use the title of Reagan’s most famous speech, it’s a time for choosing. And only one of these choices can turn Republicans into America’s majority party.